Design platform Canva has unveiled its first in-house image-generation model, Canva Craft.

TechCrunch reported on Wednesday that Canva has integrated the model, developed by its own research team, into its platform to compete with comparable models from Google, OpenAI, ByteDance and Meta.

Canva Craft splits image generation into two stages. In the first stage, it interprets a user prompt and plans a composition that includes spatial relationships between elements, relative size, visual hierarchy and information for text generation. In the second stage, it generates images at up to 2K resolution and supports up to 30 aspect ratios for different platforms.

Canva said the approach enables more refined depiction of object details and improves the readability of text within images. It also said users can precisely edit only the desired area without changing other parts of an image.

The training data also differs. Instead of photos, it used human-made design templates in Canva's library, including posters, social posts, presentations, infographics, menus and typography-focused layouts. As a result, images generated by Canva Craft can be converted into layer-separated designs through Canva Magic, an image-to-design conversion tool. Canva also launched its own model last year that understands designs and layers.

Canva Craft is available to all users in the platform's Dream Lab tab and is also offered through the Canva API. Canva plans to use its own MCP to support image generation in external chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

Canva has used multiple image-generation models on its platform. Introducing an in-house model is expected to reduce the cost of using external models' APIs. Canva also stressed that it can more effectively control image-generation quality and speed, in addition to cutting costs.

Researchers from media-generation platform Leonardo.ai, which Canva acquired in 2024, also took part in the development. Canva is also developing Craftfast and Craft-ultrafast, models designed to improve cost efficiency, and plans to release them soon.